It’s 9 PM on a Saturday and Bill hits the E-Commerce site of his local pizza parlor to order a pie with pineapple and anchovy toppings. The site knows his favorite orders, and his payment data and his order are quickly processed. Then it flashes a message that they just ran out of pineapple and asks would he care for an alternative topping?

With the new Web site that $1 billion Papa John’s launched this week, restaurant workers update the site with topping out-of-stocks by calling a headquarters’ call center, which sends a message to have the site updated for that specific restaurant. But the chain is preparing for a much faster system, where employees at each store could tell its POS system about running out of pineapple as easily as ringing up a cheesesteak to go. Read more.

Japan’s NTT and three large Japanese retail chains—Bic Camera, Nojima and Runsystem—confirmed Thursday (Oct. 9) a trial that the group says will “securely integrate the reward cards of more than 100 retailers into a single mobile phone.”

NTT will run the contactless card trial—called Gyazapo—from February to June 2009. “Once a dedicated application is downloaded into the phone, (the system) enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information of multiple retailers to be registered under a single platform,” according to an NTT statement.

When eBay on Monday (Oct. 6) announced that it was buying alternative payment vendor Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash and about $125 million worth of outstanding options, the alternative payment landscape got a lot more complicated.

Will eBay’s move prompt Amazon to reconsider accepting Bill Me Later? The Amazon and Bill Me Later “relationship is dying if not dead already,” said Bruce Cundiff, director of payments research and consulting for Javelin Strategy and Research. Read more.

The European Union on Wednesday (Oct. 8 ) proposed E-Commerce rules for the 27 nations under its jurisdiction, but if accepted, these rules would likely be mirrored in Asia and North America.

Some of the rules, according to this International Herald-Tribune story, are that retailers must make product information available before a sale, guarantee delivery within a maximum of 30 days and allow a statutory 14-day ‘cooling-off’ period in which purchasers could change their minds and be entitled to full refunds within seven days if goods fail to arrive. And companies would be banned from delivering products different than those advertised.

Google’s YouTube on Tuesday (Oct. 7) officially opened its click-to-buy program, allowing users to click on a song they like in the background of a video and instantly download it. Or perhaps click on a product seen in a video or on a poster in a video.

“Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features,” Google said in a blog announcement. “Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products—like songs, books and movies—related to the content they’re watching on the site.” This is a logical and interesting move, but it will take a very long time before even a few percent of YouTube videos will have anything to click on. Still, a journey of 1,000 Exabytes begins with a single click.

Amazon has been awarded a Patent on a methodology for rewarding customers who post a lot of reviews.

As the Register in the U.K. so aptly phrased it, “The self-described patent reform advocates at Amazon.com don’t seem to have broken their habit of putting legal hooks on just about anything they dream up.”

When a manager tries to connect a new kind of device to a network, IT is typically all over it, trying to discover potential security issues. But the much bigger risk is when a longtime network element, one that has been seen for years as innocuous and trivial, slowly becomes more intelligent and connected and quietly morphs into something that is anything but innocuous.

It happened five or six years ago when printers, faxes and scanners started getting direct access to IP—so a worker in Chicago could scan a document in and have it print out in the company’s Los Angeles and New York offices. These devices were getting smart (more CPU, RAM, hard disk) and connected. But few IT departments initially thought about the security such devices, and they became an ultra-easy way to sneak into the LAN and get access to something more valuable. Today, that identical scenario is starting to play out with kiosks. Read more.

By agreeing to pay $250 thousand for “assistive technology for blind consumers,” Apple has settled a lawsuit that accused the company of not making its iTunes site accessible to those with visual difficulties.

The deal with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office and the National Federation of the Blind also promises that Apple will redesign its site to provide blind consumers “full access,” a statement from Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley said. According to the agreement, “Apple will make iTunes fully and equally accessible by December 31, 2008, and make the remainder of iTunes and the iTunes Store fully and equally accessible by June 30, 2009″ for both Mac and Windows systems.

A U.S. Patent for a payment card that can be turned on and off was issued last year with little fanfare, but its owners are now starting to shop it around to retailers and banks. The premise is that when the consumer turns off the card, neither the card nor its associated numbers can be used for any purchases.

If it works, this could represent a different payment data strategy, because it would make the card data useless to a thief. The full Patent description also discusses how a mobile phone can be integrated into the process for additional payment authorizations. That phone would alert the consumer if someone tried using the card. Read more.

Visa is running a mobile phone trial where consumers will be able to transfer money using their phones to any other Visa user. “The pilot, which is intended to begin by the end of 2008, is the first U.S.-based trial testing mobile money transfers between Visa accounts,” Visa said, but it has already been doing it in 13 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Visa also said it will be working with cell phone maker Nokia to create a contactless payment phone that will include discounts and other ads from retailers and that it will be working to create mobile payment services for Google’s Android platform. Not all observers are favorably impressed.

Merged channel is all the rage—as it should be—but one key analyst is arguing that retailers must merge their channels, not their IT groups.

The problem is that most IT functions in-store are behind-the-scenes. To put a finer point on it, argues Nikki Baird of Retail Systems Research, is that in-store IT is not usually creating things that are customer-facing. This matters because retailers like to prioritize IT projects based on traditional ROI spreadsheet metrics, which rarely apply to new ideas for customer interactions. Read more.

Gen Y, a loose term for younger shoppers ranging in age from about 14 through 28, is a demographic that most retailers are unprepared for. That’s partially because this is the first segment that has never not known of the Internet and also because most retail executives have such a radically different worldview.

In addition, many Gen Y shoppers have never known—or believed they had—any privacy, so they are dramatically more willing to give up or sell personal data in exchange for something they see as having value. Their attention span is short, their multi-tasking skills are high and many find the idea of paying for software quaint and old-fashioned. They can prioritize how they pay (Paypal’s popular) over how much they pay as well as how they want to interact with businesses–in as many ways as possible: text on their phones, IM on their laptops, posts for them on MySpace, video pitches on YouTube and avatars in SecondLife. Read more.

A recent Best Buy incident raises an interesting security question: What call center verification methods should be used to authenticate customers before allowing them to cancel or change an order?

The story involves a Best Buy manager who supposedly couldn’t honor a buy-online-pick-up-in-store order, so he simply called customer service, pretended to be the customer and canceled the order. To make this work, the authentication details would have to include something that a store manager couldn’t find, such as a password. Read more.

StorefrontBacktalk needs some opinionated, brilliant retail IT execs who like to discuss kiosk strategies. Although these traits are not desired for a lively cocktail party, they are very much in a demand for a StorefrontBacktalk panel next month in New York City (Javits Center).

The CIO panel will discuss retail kiosk strategies: What works and what doesn’t. Any of you brave souls willing to volunteer to join us on the panel? If so, please reach out to eschuman@storefrontbacktalk.com. Thanks!

When a major site performance research site reported last week that the Oriental Trading Company Web site had a major meltdown through all of August, Oriental Trading officials raised questions about whether the report was correct. On Monday (Sept. 15), two leading site traffic tracking firms—including the firm that issued the original report—backed Oriental Trading’s position, to varying degrees.

The original report came from Gomez. And now Gomez is stepping back from its own report, according to report author Matt Poepsel, who serves as the Gomez Vice President of Performance Strategies. Read more.

Merged channel and E-Commerce issues will be the fighting words of the day at Retail Perspectives 2008 in Montreal on Monday (Sept. 22), where StorefrontBacktalk will be speaking and moderating discussions on those topics plus PCI, in-store strategies, supply chain and global tactics.

Panelists include IT execs from Build-A-Bear, Tesco and Reitmans, and confirmed audience participants include JC Penney, Jones Retail, Brookstone, Carters, Fortunoff and Casual Male. We would love to see you there.

Trying a grocery approach to buy online pick up in store, the 181-store Meijer supermarket on Thursday (Sept. 11) launched a trial called Grocery Express. It allows customers to make purchases online, schedule a pickup time and then drive to a local Meijer to have the pre-bagged and already-paid-for groceries loaded into their cars.

The program—which costs $7 for an individual order or $25 for a monthly subscription for unlimited orders—includes a “call button on the outside of the Grocery Express entry door to let their Personal Shopper know that they have arrived.” Read more.

Online customers trying to reach the 76-year-old crafts catalogue retailer Oriental Trading Company found a lot more hassle than crafts last month, according to the latest figures from online availability research firm Gomez. But the apparent Web performance plunge may not have happened, and it’s a fascinating look into the limits of Web traffic analysis.

When Gomez reported its latest batch of uptime figures for the Top 50 E-tailers covering the month of August, 3,000-employee Oriental Trading came in dead last. How dead last? The top retailer’s high broadband connection (Costco) was a 99.83 percent uptime, and the numbers for retailers stayed in the upper 90s all the way down the list, with the 49th weakest high bandwidth uptime performance going to PC Connection, which clocked in at 98.83 percent uptime. Number 50, Oriental Trading, had only 68.15 percent uptime. Read more.

Best Buy on Monday (Sept. 8 ) officially rolled out its homespun version of a retailer-neutral gift registry, but one that lets Best Buy see every transaction, whether it’s marked private or public.

The application, called Giftag, requires a small applet to be downloaded and then integrated into either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers. Once installed, users can theoretically visit any E-Commerce site, find something they want and then click on an icon to select it. The application also allows users to select specific elements of the retailer’s page to visually highlight it for a friend or relative. Read more.

One of the biggest ongoing headaches for E-Commerce execs has been customizable options for browsers, pop-up blockers, firewalls, spyware blockers and any other applet that is hawked to consumers. Without such consistency, it’s impossible to control—or even predict—how Web pages will look and act for various customers and prospects.

With a new entry into the browser battleground—Google’s Chrome—comes more customization nightmares. This problem is going to get a lot worse very quickly as many E-Commerce sites try and get more complex with more interactivity, multimedia and even 3-D experiments at the same time as consumers are getting more comfortable playing with their browser settings. Read more.

Rite Aid has severed part of a 9-year-old deal with Drugstore.com and will take back its over-the-counter medication online purchases, a move that forced Drugstore.com to “significantly cut its outlook for fiscal 2008,” according to this Wall Street Journal story.

The deal will have Rite Aid handling those purchases on its own site, which in turn will be supported by Drugstore.com. “Drugstore.com will receive about $10 million in 10 monthly payments from Rite Aid in return for relinquishing the prescription service, and will get paid for marketing the new prescription service on its Web site,” the story said.

If the slip of a lip can sink a ship, perhaps a retailer’s flick of the click can kill a prestigious campaign mighty quick. The best way for a retail chain to make a customer happy is to offer him/her a program that few others can get. And the best way to undermine that—as Best Buy discovered on Wed. (Sept. 3)—is to then accidentally make that offer to every single reward customer you have.

The chain sent out invites to its exclusive Premier Black members—supposedly limited to the biggest spenders in the chain—on Wednesday, but inadvertently E-mailed it to the full CRM database. Oops! Read more.

Over the last month, I’ve been struck by an unusually large number of reader E-mails that fundamentally question whether E-Commerce will ever truly work: Whether it will consistently make money, be profitable and be, well, worth all of the effort.

Will E-Commerce Work? You no longer have a choice. You’re thinking like this is an optional matter, such as whether you open a new store in Detroit or add a line of gloves. To be blunt, it’s not. E-Commerce is now mandatory, as dictated by the Three F Reality: Faith, Force, and Fiasco. Read more.

It looks like Amazon is no longer backing up its pricing, putting an end to its Post-Order Price Guarantee—a policy that allowed customers to recover the difference from an Amazon price drop within 30 days of a purchase. As of Monday (Sept. 1), customers who place orders on Amazon.com are not offered the 30-day guarantee, a customer service representative confirmed.

The representative said Amazon decided to do away with the policy because sometimes price drops on the Web site were actually special offers by the manufacturer of the product. Amazon would then have to compensate the difference to a customer who purchased that item within 30 days of the drop. Amazon corporate did not return repeated phone calls asking about the change. The sharks are already in the water, with at least one company smelling fresh blood. A new Web site called priceprotectr.com is hoping to benefit from Amazon’s change, expediting the launch of a new price protection plan designed for Amazon users.

After a two-year legal battle, Target has agreed to pay $6 million and make its Web site more accessible to the blind in a class action settlement with the National Federation of the Blind.

Quite a few retailers have been involved in site changes to make the Web more accessible to those with vision difficulties, but Target has been the most aggressive in fighting such efforts. As such, Target’s settlement has an especially strong chance of pressuring retailers to aggressively embrace such changes. Read more.

Site navigation problems and unpleasant booking engines are driving customers away from online travel sites and pushing them through the doors of traditional, more personable travel agencies. Even though sales for online travel sites are growing, fewer travelers are actually booking their trips online, this eMarketer report said.

This shift in trip booking bucks the trend for online travel sites, which have been more popular than offline agencies throughout the last decade. The reason for this about-face is that many customers are fed up with “unfriendly booking engines and navigation tools” and are seeking the personal touch of an offline agent. “Not so long ago, industry observers cast traditional travel agents as has-beens,” said Jeff Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the report. “Perhaps this has helped them to focus on what they do best: provide travel expertise and personalized service.”

Calvin Klein finally gave its HTML blessing to E-Commerce, offering its first for-sale items on its Web, although the E-Commerce launching as U.S.-only. Anyone visiting from outside the United States will be routed to the existing corporate brochure site.

The site is trying to attract subscribers with a gimmick this month: Offering consumers the chance to win a $1,000 online fall shopping spree in exchange for registering. Calvin Klein is also—sort of—offering a free shipping deal, but only for customers who buy more than $200 worth of apparel at a time.

A retail IT lesson from the world of politics? Maybe. Web tracking firm Keynote studied the text message blast sent by the U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the one in which his campaign promised to tell supporters his VP selection before it was broadly announced.

That message didn’t quite work out politically, as CNN broadcast the choice hours before the text blast was supposed to start. As a result, the campaign immediately triggered the blast, which didn’t work well, either. About 50 percent of people who subscribed to receive the text message from the Obama campaign regarding the VP pick may not have received it “in a timely fashion and perhaps not at all,” Keynote said. Does this mean Common Short Code SMS messaging won’t work for large national blasts? Not necessarily. But if you’re relying on getting your data out to prospects, it’s probably a good idea to vote for a different transmission method.

Has Amazon decided what it wants to be when it grows up? More to the point, are there indications that it has now decided that one thing it does not want to be is yet another thin-margined retailer?

One tech blogger is arguing that Amazon wants to get as far away from retailing as possible by examining its hiring choices surrounding Kindle and Amazon’s Web Services. Interesting reading.

The IT chief at Netflix has pointed the finger of blame for its site problems last month at “a database corruption event in our shipping system.” The problem prevented customers from receiving their DVDs for about three days.

Mike Osier, head of IT Operations at Netflix, wrote in a blog posting on Aug. 22 that it was “a key faulty hardware component” that caused the hiccup. “On Monday, 8/11, our monitors flagged a database corruption event in our shipping system,” Osier said. But why does the site hide its blog? Read more.

With the frequent product changes executed by any large e-tailer’s site, the tech hurdles of launching a mirror site in another language can be daunting. But this challenge has created a small industry of companies that are trying to facilitate rapid globalization for e-tailers.

One such company is an 8-year-old outfit called MotionPoint, which has an interesting method for mirroring retail sites, described in this Wednesday (Sept. 2) story in The Financial Times of London: “When a customer wants to access a foreign language version of a particular site, page or item, a MotionPoint server passes on the request to the original site. The response, in English, prompts MotionPoint to retrieve a previously translated version of the page or item held in its own stored data and send it on to the customer. The foreign language versions of each page or product are kept updated by human translators, who use software that ensures the translation fits the space available on the page. They are also automatically alerted to changes made on the original site, enabling material to be updated within a few hours rather than the days required by a traditional operation with translators not working directly on a Web-based system.”

JCPenney is testing the Australian waters a bit with an online push. The retailers has a local URL and an Australian company handling all operations, but it’s still shipping merchandise from the States and asking Australian shoppers to wait “12 to 14 working days. This “request” prompted one Australian publication to ask “whether Australians would be prepared to wait two weeks to receive something purchased online, especially when goods shipped from Amazon in the U.S. generally arrive within a week if in stock.”

But any online attention is a good thing, that story said, given “the ambivalence shown to online shopping by Myer, Target (Australia) and David Jones.” Sharon Hooker, operations manager of JCPIC Australia, said global currency fluctuations may prove helpful: “All prices on the JCPenney Australia site are shown in Australian dollars. With many items priced comparatively lower in the United States, buyers are in for some very pleasant surprises.”

In an overall down market where the 150-store Nordstrom chain is seeing a 4.3 percent sales drop, online operations are jumping 15 percent–accounting for almost 8 percent of all sales. Company execs now project online to soon top 10 percent. Even more intriguing: Nordstrom is reporting a sharp increase in the number of multi-channel shoppers, who now represent almost a third of all sales.

But Nordstrom is doing online differently, according to this wonderful profile in The Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle). First, Nordstrom is delivering the identical merchandise online and offline, a tactic quite different than many other cross-channel retailers. Secondly, its call center staffing has not been outsourced, a move that the customer service-intensive chain said gives it a competitive advantage.

When eBay announced Wednesday (Aug. 20) it was changing its pricing structure and boasted a 70 percent fee reduction, many sellers had a very different take on the matter. Some even suggested it was actually a thinly-disguised fee hike to discourage the sale of lower priced items.

In various discussion groups, sellers have criticized eBay, saying its new fee policy liberally uses what some sellers not-so-fondly dub “eBay math.” Read more.

While North American retail execs are planning for trivial—if any—IT investment increases this year, with “more than one-quarter of retailers expecting lower IT spending,” more than half of their Asia Pacific counterparts are preparing for significantly higher IT spending, according to new Forrester numbers released this week. A bit of the Tortoise and the Hare perhaps?

In North America, “the mean estimate for share of IT budget devoted to innovation in 2007 was 35 percent,” the Forrester report said. “But a lower median at 30 percent and mode at 20 percent suggest that a few retailers planned heavy funding of innovation, while most planned much less investment.” Read more.

A lot of retailers have been tinkering with the idea of using virtual online worlds as a marketing tool, but there haven’t been many major retailers committing to the strategy, with the possible exception of Circuit City. As major chains are doubling up their focus on computer-savvy young consumers, though, other major chains are finding their aversion to avatars giving in to their adoration of avarice.

Sears, Kohl’s and J.C. Penny are the latest chains to try selling clothes in popular teen virtual worlds, allowing users to purchase apparel for online avatars. The retailers are teaming up with avatar sites and animating actual apparel lines that teens and tweens can place on their avatar characters, according to this Wall Street Journal piece.

A “persistent and mysterious technical glitch” has severely disrupted business operations at the massive online film rental site Netflix, “potentially affecting millions of its customers,” according to this story in The San Jose Mercury News.(UPDATE: ValleyWag is reporting that the outage happened “because of massive database corruption in their Oracle cluster caused by a botched upgrade”)

The company was unable to ship any DVDs to its customers on Tuesday (Aug. 12), managed only some deliveries Wednesday and said it again was forced to halt shipments for much of the day Thursday, said Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey. A company-issued blog post warned that “the issues we’ve faced over the last several days have been significant and there’s no guarantee at this point that our shipping operations will be fully restored by tomorrow.” The story said that the note did not identify the cause of the problem and Swasey previously said Netflix executives were having trouble isolating it.

For the first time in its more than 100-year history, J.C. Penney on Thursday (Aug. 14) launched a CRM program for all of its customers. Until Thursday, the only CRM program the chain ever had was limited to J.C. Penney credit card customers.

But the $20 billion retail chain, with roots dating back to 1902, decided to use its customers’ payment card numbers as customer identification numbers. To avoid PCI conflict, J.C. Penney is using a form of tokenization to convert those payment card numbers into “a different ID number,” said company spokeswoman Kate Parkhouse. Read more.

Polo Ralph Lauren has launched a mobile commerce project in the United States that pushes its homegrown version of 2-D barcodes, with its Quick Response (QR) codes appearing initially on print advertisements.

Some are questioning, though, whether the chain’s lower priced approach might limit the number of consumer phones that can access the related content. Read more.

It seems Circuit City has concluded that the Web isn’t just a fad, after all, with a major E-Commerce revamp coming just a couple of weeks after the chain confirmed a substantial multimedia push for its employee-training extranet.

Beyond alliances with a host of publishing companies to share their content on circuitcity.com, the changes announced Tuesday (Aug. 13) acknowledged that most Circuit City customers use the Web to decide if they’ll go to a store. “The Internet is our new front door,” said Brian S. Bradley, Circuit City’s senior vice president for multi-channel. The changes include blog entries, more demos and an interactive forum for talk with each other and Circuit City sales reps. Love how the interactive forum is painted as a CC innovation. Wonder if these guys ever heard of Usenet?

A Web site performance survey from the U.K.’s Retail Bulletin shows the larger, better known sites—including Staples, Amazon and Laura Ashley—delivering much weaker Web performances than sharply smaller rivals.

“What is surprising is that the top 15 sites are typically much less reliant on the Internet for their revenues than the bottom 15,” said Lawrence Shaw, founder of Sitemorse, which co-created the study. “If the table was reversed, then it would make more sense.” Read more.

If it makes U.S. retailers feel any better, their U.K. counterparts aren’t faring any better in making cross-channel and especially merged channel efforts work. The percentage of online sales among those merchants has plateaued, holding steady at 4.4 percent for the last two years, according to a Martec report.

What makes those numbers look even weaker is that those figures have flat-lined while the percentage of U.K. retailers offering E-Commerce sites have been sharply increasing, hitting 68 percent this year, compared with 58 percent in 2007.

Senior members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have instructed top brass from several companies with strong Web interests–including Google, Microsoft, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon–to report back on whether they’ve tweaked their ads to match consumers’ online habits. Although no E-Commerce companies were initially contacted, if Congress tries to restrict Web sites from customizing their content, it will have a huge retail impact.

There’s not much of a real distinction between a traditional banner ad on MSN pushing the latest Disney movie and using the same technique on Macys.com to make sure that purses appear on its homepage and–for this particular customer–all are displayed as pink. As long as the focus is placed on permission rather than banning, the damage should be minimal. Nothing to worry about then. When’s the last time you heard of Congress overreacting to something it doesn’t understand?

It’s the kind of issue that never existed in brick-and-mortars. When a physical store discontinues a physical product, gremlins don’t typically sneak into customers’ homes and take back the paid-for products. And yet, in effect, that’s what Yahoo inadvertently did when it shut down its music download service.

Yahoo announced a few months ago that it was shutting down its online music store, which includes killing the “servers used to validate that the music customers play is not violating copyright laws,” said a report in Forbes. Although Yahoo said that “music purchased on its music service will still work, users may not be able to move files to ‘new computers or devices.’ As a result, Yahoo is encouraging customers to burn CDs to back up the music they purchased.” Last week, Yahoo decided to offer customers coupons to pay for consumers to “replace their music collections on Rhapsody’s music store or give them a refund. Customers will have until the end of the year to take Yahoo up on its offer.”

A possible new slogan for Borders.com in New York: “You give us 90 seconds. We’ll give you a lottery ticket.”

At least that seems to be the idea, as the book chain is trying to get consumers to spend 90 seconds on its newly launched E-Commerce site. For those willing to give it a try, the bookseller will enter them in a lottery to win $1,000. Hardly MegaBucks, but what do you expect from a bookseller? The only problem: Will this attract prospective customers or non-prospects who just want the money?

J.Crew said Wednesday (July 30) that it had made “too many” mistakes after it launched its new site a month earlier, amid complaints of crashes and frequent slowdowns.

Apparently, one of those mistakes included precisely how the retailer said it made too many mistakes, as the company made more than a half-dozen changes to its homepage apology from Wednesday to Thursday. Read more.

Customers who have already supplied Amazon with their payment information will now be able to use that information, without re-entering it, to make purchases on other sites. With this rollout, Amazon officially joins the ranks of eBay’s PayPal, BillMeLater and Google Checkout as directly offering an alternative payment system. Before this, Amazon still had some skin in the game, as it’s been a minority investor in BillMeLater. Read more.

When Amazon.com and Tivo on Tuesday (July 22) said they would be selling E-Commerce merchandise directly from Tivo screens, it was the most visible sign yet of an imminent radical change in merged channel. Move over mobile, call center, catalog, in-store and online: Make Room For TV.

Deals like the Amazon-Tivo arrangement will present context-relevant ads to appear right alongside—or embedded within—various entertainment and information shows. For advertisers, this is merely the next logical step following obvious product placement in entertainment shows. (”Gosh, Grandma, what a large Apple logo you have!”) For retailers, though, it’s a way of getting that profitable E-Commerce site somewhere other than on a PC or on a smartphone. Read more.

As retailers watch the crucial social networking space, overwhelmingly dominant leader MySpace is very comfortably holding onto a 72 percent market share, according to stats covering June. But Facebook saw its growth soar 40 percent, which might be a bad omen for MySpace in a few years.

MySpace is still in a very comfortable position, holding a marketshare that is more than four times as large as Facebook’s 17 percent, according to figures released Wednesday (July 23) by Hitwise. Statistics, though, can be misleading, especially when the base numbers are small. A much smaller site called MyYearBook.com is only at 1.54 percent marketshare, but that was enough for it to register a 318 percent increase, compared with its 0.33 percent marketshare recorded last June.

New stats out of India show three things: a sharply growing acceptance of the Internet (27 percent year-to-year increase); embracing of American sites (the top three most popular sites were from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft); and huge growth potential, given that barely 3 percent of its people today use the Internet.

The latest data points, courtesy of a report issued Monday (July 21) by Comscore, have several encouraging points for global e-tailers looking to tap India’s 1.1 billion people, which is more than triple the U.S.’s measly 303.8 million people. Read more.

Wal-Mart is certainly a company of few words. But when the world’s largest retailer (it’s expecting to hit $400 billion in annual sales later this year or early next year) wants to make a technology endorsement, a few words are all that’s necessary.

Such is the case with the announcement Monday (July 21) that Wal-Mart is standardizing on an Oracle business intelligence package—Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) to be precise. Read more.

In an eerie snapshot of where some top marketers want to take the next generation of search engines, a Japanese government-backed research project is working on a search that is based on what a user does, not a keyword a user types in.

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer’s activities “based on data captured by mobile device camera.” Read more.

Despite an almost universal embrace of the idea of merged channel, most retailers aren’t getting any closer to making it a reality, with overly restrictive inventory reserve policies, inconsistent data and political resistance getting most of the blame, according to a new Forrester Research report.

“How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory” for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. “You never know where demand is going to crystallize.” He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by “reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel.” Read more.

Consumers older than 50 are rapidly growing fond of the Web, with such users checking news, for example, more frequently than those younger than 20 as well as participating in online communities more. But the new university study found that instant messaging and video downloads were “still tools for young users. Only 9 percent of users 50+ said IM was important or very important compared with 48 percent of users younger than 20.”

“The perception is that Americans over 50 only dabble on the Internet, but we are finding that they are increasingly spending time online becoming involved in robust Internet activities, such as online communities,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In specific areas, there is often little difference in use of online technology between older users and some of the youngest users.”

For those e-tailers wondering if video is an effective way to reach American consumers, here’s the latest video stat, courtesy of Comscore: In May alone, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 12 billion online videos, representing an increase of 45 percent versus one year ago.

Nearly 142 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 85 videos per viewer in May. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (83.8 million), who watched an average of 50 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (60.8 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (40.2 million) and Microsoft Sites (29.5 million).

Two recent developments—one involving a New York federal judge and the other involving a group of U.S. senators—are signaling serious difficulties for E-Commerce efforts over the next two years.

The assumption of some anonymity on E-Commerce sites can be critical. Let’s look at a scenario for Amazon.com. One of its most critical value-adds is customer comments—both good and bad—about its products. What if a consumer—employed in the consumer appliance world—purchased a toaster that was absolutely horrible? Read more.

Will consumers ever deploy counter-top barcode scanners and a Web site to have groceries delivered to them automatically? A company called Ikan.net is hoping they will.

The system combines a Web-connected barcode scanner, which scans every product before it’s thrown out or recycled, and then adds it to a shopping list. The list then is shared with either a grocery retailer directly or a grocery delivery service like Peapod, which does the delivery of the empty items. This nicely done New York Times story shows the efforts of its writer to use the system.

A new E-commerce payment system at UrbanOutfitters.com allows users to complete purchases in one screen, boosting cart conversion rates by 19 percent, according to an Internet Retailer story that quoted Dmitri Siegel, managing director of Urban Outfitters Direct.

The original approach forced customers to use several pages to handle payment, address and other purchase details. “We were losing a lot of customers with that,” Siegel said.